Apple's education event just ended, and just as Ars Technica said, Apple announced better support for textbooks, as well as a textbook authoring tool. The textbook authoring tool is heavily inspired by Keynote and Pages, and hence, I already know it's going to be top-notch and very pleasant to use. In addition, the company also repositioned iTunes U as a Blackboard competitor. As great as all these new tools are, several large red flags went up in my mind: I remember what it was like being the only student who didn't use Windows. Update: "Any e-textbook author that wants access to the iPad-toting masses must make his or her work an exclusive to iBooks 2."

Look, I don't think every school/university will throw all books out of the window tomorrow and commit 100% to the iPad, iBooks and Apple. A number will take a look in to it, run trails, others will wait to see what happens.

If it works, more and more schools will use it more and more. If it doesn't, or doesn't for some schools or for some situations, they'll stick with traditional teaching methods.

I'm trying to write more using a pen and it's not easy. My brain is way faster than my hand, causing some strange letters to appear. I think this illustrates that we still need some traditional teaching and skills.

When I tell other people this they often also say they have trouble writing. Sure we still write the occasional word or two, but do we write ever whole sentences? More and more people don't, they type it. Despite being a geeky nerd I don't think it's good to become so depended on technology.

I'm trying to write more using a pen and it's not easy. My brain is way faster than my hand, causing some strange letters to appear. I think this illustrates that we still need some traditional teaching and skills.

Strange ! Even though I'm more or less born with a computer in the hands, it's the reverse for me. I strongly prefer pen and paper to computers for note-taking, drafting, and pretty much everything that requires a fast communication channel between my brain and a storage support.

I believe that is mainly because computers have inflexible input methods and tend to make me focus too much on appearance and layout. On a sheet of paper, it's natural to write in several directions, draw stuff to illustrate a point, strike stuff and redraw it from scratch elsewhere. On a computer, I tend to keep stuff clean, take the time to erase and rewrite, adjust the appearance of drawings, and I lose too much time doing it.

I would love to see a computer designed for pen input and with software that is as straightforward to play with as a piece of paper. However, it seems that Microsoft and their OEMs have done too much of a good job to associate pen tablet computers with crappy tablet computers.

When I tell other people this they often also say they have trouble writing. Sure we still write the occasional word or two, but do we write ever whole sentences? More and more people don't, they type it. Despite being a geeky nerd I don't think it's good to become so depended on technology.

Myself, computers and studies ruin my writing because they make me use English all the time, to the point where my written French becomes grammatically awful while my English does not get much better Studying does help keeping good handwriting though, maybe we should do it more often in our lives ?